Member Article

Manchester’s film festival goes digital to boost audience engagement

The Manchester Film Festival is revolutionising its digital offering in a bid to create a more interactive experience and improve the way it engages with its audience.

The four-day festival, which returns to Manchester every year to celebrate the best in independent films, has invested in WorkMobile’s award-winning mobile data capture solution to encourage more people to get involved in its ‘Audience Choice’ award.

As the winner of the ‘Audience Choice’ award is based solely on viewer votes, attendees in previous years have had to go online to cast their votes for their favourite film. However, in a bid to reduce time and effort, organisers have adopted a speedy data capture solution to obtain the views of attendees after the screening.

Attendees can now quickly enter their nominations at the end of each film via simple digital forms that are available on iPads situated around the venue.

This information can then be easily collected and analysed, making it simpler to determine the overall winner of the award.

Neil Jeram-Croft, director of operations at the Manchester Film Festival, said: “Interacting and engaging with our audiences is crucial to the success of our event. It’s for this reason that our ‘Audience Choice’ award was originally created - to encourage people to get involved and share their thoughts on the material they’ve just seen.

“Having said this, it became clear to us that our previous method of collecting nominations needed improving on, so that we could achieve higher levels of engagement. When people have to go away and take the time to submit their entries online, this has a lower engagement rate than if there was a team of people waiting at the end of the screening to quickly input their nomination for them. This is where the WorkMobile solution has helped to create a much more interactive experience for our attendees, and people are now more willing to supply their nomination. We’re also extremely impressed by how simple the tool is to use, and how quickly the solution was designed and built to meet our specific needs. Following the success of WorkMobile’s solution at this year’s event, we will be continuing to use the tool for future festivals.”

Aaron Hills, technical consultant at WorkMobile, said: “In today’s digital era, the events industry is facing the challenge of developing more engaging and immersive experiences for their audiences. With the rise of mobile technology, a wealth of opportunity has been created to enhance audience interaction and get people more involved with the activities that are taking place.

“In the case of the Manchester Film Festival, the team had already generated a great way to get its audience involved through its Audience Choice award. However, the old method of data collection was becoming less effective and needed enhancing to encourage more people to enter their nominations. Our complete solution was able to could combat this issue and help event organisers create a more interactive experience for their attendees. Now the team has a tool that encourages greater engagement and makes it easier to decide who the overall winner of the award is.”

For more information, please visit: www.workmobileforms.com/

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ursula Hutchinson .